Blogs - Finalmessiah

I realised that I had not updated my blog for a while and since you are now reading this you realise that I decided to continue it.

So here we go....

There is a number of things I should add, we now have a new member to our team who will be doing our music and sound within the game, I would mention who this is but as we are not ready to reveal anything on our game yet I won't. We are also in the middle of talks to bring on an artist as well to primarily do the concept art and textures but also pitch in with the 3D modelling.

So as you can see we are progressing however the actual progression of our pre-production is going forward but slowly, this is beginning to change due a very nifty program that we found. Since I am not entirely sure on the level of our license yet I won't say the name but due to how much it is helping as soon as I do figure that out I will be willing to splash the name all over the front of our project!

Now I know that with an Indie game, the pre-production can be less rigid than in a "AAA" game but I do believe that in order to do the best that we can we should still have to follow some rules. So we are ignoring all of the High Concept and Pitch for obvious reasons as there is no publisher or investor other than ourselves but the Game Design Document (GDD) really will help with the production so that we all know where we stand.

The Competitive Game Analysis (CGA) is perhaps something that you can ignore, we aren't but at the same time since we would finish this project anyway we are just using it to reduce any weaknesses our game may have.

When these parts have been finalised we will move onto the Proof of Concept, again something that is perhaps only really required within the realms of "AAA" game development but I feel it will enable us to garner more interest in our project earlier in its development.

OK so that is more than enough from me, I thought I may add something though. If you are reading this and you are interested in creating a game for yourself then please don't hesitate to ask for advice whether by comment or message. I don't know everything but I will help if I can.

Continuing from "And On the First Day"

We have had our team meeting last night, not the first in fact but our fourth and all I can say is that it feels like we haven't moved from our first meeting. This of course is not true, we have moved forward with our ideas but still....

It then came to me that if I went back I thought of all the topics we had covered in our meetings we had actually covered a fair bit and that actually we had fallen into the first trap that most Indie Developers cascade with some velocity in to. That trap is the lack of documentation!

Which however I want to spin it, is still my fault.

I can however remedy this.

So now I will have to start writing up a full game design document (GDD), if we were going to go the way of a publisher then I would have to knock up a high level concept and proposal; in all fairness I probably should do these as well just for good measure but it can take a back seat for now.

Trouble is I will now have to go over this with the team so I make sure I have all the information because like fool I didn't take meeting minutes!

If its worth doing, its worth doing well.

OK so I have to say that I am surprised that you are reading this but since I have now written a blog I shouldn't be surprised.

I should mention that I have never written a blog before and other than some less than successful attempts at writing in a diary when I was 6 I have never chronicled parts of my life. If you didn't read the summary about me then you wouldn't know that I am an IT contractor working full time or as full time as you can when you contract and I am currently doing a game designers course to help me with fulfilling my dream of becoming a game designer.

I decided to start this blog to not only help myself but perhaps others who would like to venture in to the game industry but work full time and believe that they don't have the time and perhaps, if you believe that you could be right and this could make you smirk with self satisfaction upon reading these entries to my demise however I will be doing my best to prove you wrong.

This blog will hopefully be updated at least once a week but perhaps more often as there are new developments. I know this first one is fairly long but I need to get the background out of the way since the creation of this blog was not at the start of the project.

So what has happened already, well firstly I am the the game designer and I will also be doing various amounts within development, artistry and sound but since the entire team will be helping or predominately working on these sections as well I suppose I should call myself the lead game designer. There are three others within the team so far each of them are either students or in full time employment like myself and the currently make up the lead writer, lead developer and lead sound artist and at some point we will be looking for a 3D modeller and concept artist.

We are developing a sci-fi, strategy, RPG with a massive focus on the story driven narrative and strategy elements. We are still deciding on many of the different facets of this project but as a team we have decided that since the main focus of our game is the story we have set our writer on the task of coming up with a story arch which myself and other team members can then start implementing game mechanics, sound and level design as well as game objects.

Well that's the end of the first blog I know it was long but hopefully it kept you interested, see you next time.